Revista Korpus 21 - Volumen 4, número 10

ERIC VAN YOUNG, THE SPHYNX OF SAN COSME: A HISTORIAN’S THOUGHTS ON WRITING A BIOGRAPHY
elitist attitude and life-style. Oscar Wilde, for example,
is said to have lived his life as though it
were itself a work of art: his predilections, selfpresentation,
and philosophy, not to mention
his works (for example, his famous essay “The
Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance
of Doing Nothing” [1891]) all point in
this direction. 12 The Marxian framework has produced
some major works in biography, as for
example Isaac Deutscher’s (1907-1967) three
volumes (1954-1963) on the life of Leon Trotsky.
There is information of a personal nature about
its subject in this sprawling work, but the primary
driver of the narrative is the life of a great
political figure within a specifically communist
revolutionary context—a work about a Marxist
by a Marxist. I find this to be reductionistic to an
extreme degree since in this framework individual
thought and action are in large measure (not
entirely, to be sure) reduced to social forces determined
by the relations of production, or in this
case at a remove in a massive political upheaval
ostensibly fueled by the logical outcome of conflicting
forces rooted in those relations. My good
friend, the late Argentine economic historian
Juan Carlos Garavaglia, who taught in Mexico
for a number of years, left me with a number of
fond memories, among which was the aphoristic
injunction to remember that “people have psychologies
as well as sociologies”.
This brings me to the question of the psychobiographical
framework for biography, to which
I devote somewhat more space here since I find
it the most interesting, albeit the most risky, and
it is closest to my own preoccupations as a biographer.
The psychobiographical framework
is less of a straitjacket in writing a life than the
Marxian approach, for example, since it is specifically
geared toward understanding individuals,
the objective of biographical writing, rather than
laying out broad historical generalizations as instantiated
in the life of a single person. But in its
many possible degrees of interpretive freedom
also lie a great deal of risk, that of over-interpretation
in the service of a decidedly slippery
psychological model. As an explicitly identified
12 See the magnificent biography by the late Richard Ellman
(1918-1987), Oscar Wilde (Ellman, 1987), posthumously
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1989. Ellman, also
the author of a monumental biography of James Joyce, does
not explicitly write that Wilde lived his life as a work of art,
but it is a fair conclusion to judge from what he presents.
sub-genre of biography (which may itself, as
Henry James asserted, be viewed as a sub-genre
of history) this dates from the works of Sigmund
Freud and obviously employs psychoanalytic
concepts (although other psychological models
have been applied) to plumb the depths of historical
actors’ minds and motivations. It is a tool
that can have either a blunt or finely honed edge;
that is to say, the conditions of its applicability
and the subtlety of its application, and therefore
the degree of its credibility, have varied widely.
It has always seemed to me a very promising
approach that has produced very mixed results,
demonstrating its “idiosyncratic nature” (Kushner,
1993:20). 13 There are a number of problems
with this framework, of which I mention only
three here. The first is the proposition that psychoanalytic
models of psychological structure
and function are transhistorical and transcultural—that
they apply equally well to all cultures
at all times in history, a problematic assumption.
The second problem is that a knowledge paradigm
developed and mostly applied in a clinical
setting in which a dialogic process between patient
and clinician is absolutely essential to the
efficacy of treatment, is often applied to a dead
subject who cannot answer back, elucidate, or
progress emotionally; when it’s a live subject
the published analysis becomes a fait accompli
of which discussion may produce more heat
than light. This is not exactly a static situation,
since the biographer, try to avoid it though he
might, will almost certainly paste some emotional
projections of his own onto the subject of
the study. 14 But the biographee cannot object or
13 While principally a critique of Erik Erikson’s psychobiographical
study of Martin Luther, this article also contains
useful comments in criticism of psychohistory more broadly.
14 For example, my own conclusion that Lucas Alamán’s
character may have tended toward the melancholy might
well be a projection of my own personality onto his, although
I have tried to think my way through this to find plausible
evidence for it in the historical sources. The best counterweight
to this sort of thing, obviously, is for the biographer
to make his own emotional and intellectual characteristics
as explicit to himself as possible (“possible” being the key
word here). Related to this is the question of a positive or
negative emotional attachment of biographer to biographee.
Elizabeth Young-Bruehl (1946-2011), a psychoanalyst and the
biographer of Hannah Arendt and Anna Freud, once referred
to this as the “ich” (as in “icky”) factor—whether or not one
likes the person one is writing about, and beyond this if they
are even likable in any normal sense. The classic limiting case
here is that of Adolf Hitler’s biographers, among Anglophone
writers Alan Bullock and Ian Kershaw, for example, where
predictable revulsion is overridden by the inherent historical
importance of the subject.
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